Search results for ""Author Cato Pedder""

''Exploring the past, bringing it to vivid life with wonderful prose . . . Pedder writes with perspicacity and sensitivity . . . We need more books like this'' Observer''Fascincating and engrossing'' Literary ReviewHow did South Africa turn out the way it did? In Moederland - ''Motherland'', in Afrikaans - Cato Pedder takes us on an eye-opening journey across four centuries, tracing the country''s turbulent past and the rise and fall of apartheid (and her family''s charged legacy) through the lives of nine very different women.KROTOA is Khoikhoi translator to the newly arrived Dutch East India Company ANGELA, a former slave from Bengal, climbs the ladder of settler society ELSJE arrives from Germany aged 3, marries at 13, a mother at 15ANNA, mistress of the Cape''s grandest estate, regains control from her violent husbandMARGARETHA, uncompromising Afrikane

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Moederland is a courageous and modern appraisal of what it means to be descended from the people who created the ultraracist apartheid system in South Africa. Illuminating its turbulent history through the lives of her female ancestors, it is a history of South Africa like no other, told from the perspective of women long silenced in the historical narrative. It asks, what were they doing while white supremacy was constructed? In Moederland, Cato Pedder travels the centuries from the 1600s, when Cape Town was a remote outpost of the Dutch East India Company, to the kraal of a Zulu king in the 1800s before doubling back to Europe and then culminating with the English Quaker aunt who defies apartheid to marry across the colour line. As anti-racist campaigners call out the statue of Jan Smuts in Parliament Square, Cato painstakingly excavates the long-forgotten life stories of the women of her prehistory, unpacking the legacy of her Afrikaans heritage and bringing their collect

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